The Barna Group recently did a survey on church attendance and avoidance (click here to read).  Not sure this one matches our experiences. 

In the summary report George Barna honed in on a group he is calling (for lack of a better term) the “Unattached” population.  In his words, this is a segment of the U.S. population who “have had no personal interaction with a regularly-convened faith community.  This segment represents one out of every four adults (23%) in America. About one-third of the segment was people who have never attended a church at any time in their life.”

According to Barna’s survey, compared to regular churchgoers, the so-called Unattached are “more likely to feel stressed out, less likely to be concerned about the moral condition of the nation, less likely to vote, much less likely to believe that they are making a positive difference in the world, and less optimistic about the future.” 

Does this match your experience where you are?

The reason I wanted to write about this is because I find it does not match my experience in Los Angeles.

Okay, maybe it is true in the case of the drug addict or gang member, who is totally caught up in his own world of self-isolation and despair.  But in general, there is a large number of people who dislike church and religion, and who have little or no connection to these things, and yet they care very much about helping others in their local community and making a difference on a national and global scale.  They are the ones who always vote and encourage others to vote.   

This report seems to say that the less attached you are to church meetings the less likely you are going to care or be capable of caring.  In my experience, I find it is often the churchgoers who tell me, “Don’t think bad of me, but I didn’t vote.”  I know a fair number of churched folks who don’t know what’s happening politically.  “Watching the news used to make me anxious so I just stopped watching it,” they’ll say.   

In my experience, people who are rejecting church and religion are some of the first to protest social injustice and put their necks on the line to do so.  Some recognize God as the source of their concern and compassion, others don’t.  But sadly almost all of them would not attribute connection to church and religion as a way to express this concern or compassion.  Critiquing the hypocrisy of the “churched”, I hear them say that in their observations a commitment to regular church meetings and Bible reading has not produced people of higher moral standing, so “why go to church or read the Bible?”   

Granted, there may be a difference in what the Unattached and churched populations are defining as an ideal “moral” nation.  While churchgoers often ask “What are we going to do about abortion, homosexuality, and what public schools are teaching about intelligent design?”, the so-called Unattached often ask “What are we going to do about poverty, hunger, oppression, the environment, etc?”  While the Unattached do not own the corner of the market on addressing the latter concerns, neither do churched folks.  I find there are many Unattached people who have made lifestyle changes for the sake of addressing the latter concerns. 

There is a significant part of the unattached population that is coping with life very well and they are separated from Christianity.  My coach recently wrote about this, saying, “We must get out of the habit of thinking that we are taking Jesus to the people and start remembering that we are going to those missing from the community/fellowship to help them discover the Christ who is already there.”   

Just some thoughts.

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